New 250GB Hard Drive not recognised

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grafyx

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#13888 3-Jun-2007 02:19

I need to install a new 250Gb IDE/ATA133 Hard Drive on my system, which is getting on a bit now. The motherboard is an ASRock KS78X, with 512Mb RAM and running Windows 2000 Pro.

I'm ready to partition and format the disk, but the system only sees the drive as 127 GB. I've tried updating the BIOS on the motherboard, but it's made no difference.

There are two 115GB drives already on the system which work fine. The new drive is being installed as Primary IDE Slave and the jumpers are set accordingly on both disks on that IDE channel.

Any ideas ?

[Moderator edti (MF) modified Gb (gigabit) to GB (gigabyte) for easier reading]

freitasm

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#73279 3-Jun-2007 07:46

Hard drive sizes are limited on Windows 2000. Apparently if you have Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or higher you can enable large drive support by changing the registry.

Note that you will need to have Windows 2000 installed on a smaller drive first to do this.

grafyx

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#73282 3-Jun-2007 08:54

Thanks - it's amazing that nobody I know knew that !

I'll see what can be done !

grafyx

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#73283 3-Jun-2007 08:57

I meant to say I'm running Service Pack 4, so I just need to check out what needs doing to the registry.

Any info anyone has on that would be welcome !

freitasm

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#73288 3-Jun-2007 09:43

I've posted a link to that in my previous reply...

grafyx

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#73290 3-Jun-2007 10:23

Thanks !

And sorry...I don't know how come I didn't spot the link before !

I'll have to check my motherboard's most recent BIOS includes support for 48 bit LBA. If not, I will be stuck and may have to try to get several smaller disks and an IDE bus extender card / ATA 133 adaptor.

grafyx

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#73412 5-Jun-2007 00:24

Oddly, when I went to enable the LBA item in the registry, it was already present ! But I didn't put it there, and this whole system is one I put together so unless one of the video editing programs I use made this change to the registry, I can only think Service Pack 4 does address the issue where Microsoft say it doesn't.

But the machine still sees the disk as 127Gb, so I'll try it with a PCI to ATA133 adaptor just in case that's any different, otherwise I will have to assume the motherboard isn't going to recognise the disk as 250Gb even with the BIOS update.

Anyone know for certain whether or not the ASRock K7S8X motherboard can accept drives over 137Gb once it has the latest BIOS (2.60) ?

One odd thing is that Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.00 sees the disk as 250Gb in the tab that merely lists what disks are attached to the system, but only as 127Gb in the partitioning and formatting section. Windows 2000's own disk partitioning and formatting tool sees it as 127Gb.